A survey of economists released on Thursday indicates that South Korea's exports, often seen as a bellwether for global trade, are likely to maintain robust growth in July. While the pace is expected to moderate from the near-record highs seen recently, the second-strongest export gain in the current cycle is anticipated, driven by the relentless surge in global AI computing demand fueling a boom in HBM, DRAM, and NAND memory chips. Memory chips are absolutely critical to South Korea's export performance and its overall economy.

The nation is home to the world's two largest memory chip producers: SK Hynix and Samsung. SK Hynix, the global leader in HBM, serves as the primary supplier of HBM memory systems to Nvidia. Meanwhile, Samsung is the world's largest provider of DRAM and NAND storage and has recently joined Nvidia's supplier list for HBM, particularly for the GB200 and GB300 series AI computing clusters. As AI agents and other breakthrough applications permeate industries worldwide, generating massive demand for AI inference computing, the future for AI chip, HBM, enterprise SSD, and high-performance networking and power infrastructure appears boundless. Additionally, the on-device AI trend is set to drive a new growth curve for consumer-grade DRAM and NAND storage demand.

July Export Surge of 59% Expected Amidst Stock Market Plunge and Trade Prosperity

According to the median forecast from a survey of 15 economists, South Korea's total exports in July are projected to surge 59.0% compared to the same period last year. This growth rate would be slightly lower than June's staggering 70.7% increase, which was the largest since 1978. Nevertheless, the July figure is expected to be the second-highest annual growth rate since the current export expansion cycle began in June 2025.

Analysts attribute the continued strong export growth to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, as global AI data center investment drives up memory chip prices. "A large part of the growth reflects higher semiconductor trade prices. The increase in shipment volume is relatively more modest," noted Ha Keon-hyeong, an economist at Shinyoung Securities. Data compiled by South Korea's statistics office shows that exports in the first 20 days of July surged 52.3% year-on-year, with semiconductor exports, dominated by memory chips, soaring approximately 180.6%.

"Given the ongoing boom in semiconductor demand and exports, the strong underlying momentum in South Korea's exports is unlikely to change much," said Park Sang-hyun, an economist at iM Securities. He pointed out that the slowdown partly stems from fewer working days compared to July last year.

The survey results come amid a severe sell-off in South Korean stocks. The benchmark KOSPI index has fallen over 30% this month, driven by extreme deleveraging, crowded position unwinding, and concerns about lackluster returns on AI capital expenditure. The index plunged 10.84% on July 28 and fell another 5.98% on July 29 after briefly dropping 12.6%, triggering a 20-minute market-wide halt. This has brought the index about 40% below its June peak, wiping out over $2 trillion in market value.

This is not merely a single-market adjustment but a cross-market liquidity shock from the simultaneous unwinding of leveraged ETFs, global quantitative momentum, crowded semiconductor positions, and AI valuations. The concentration of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which account for nearly half of the KOSPI's market cap, combined with heavy retail investor bets via daily 2x single-stock leveraged ETFs, has created a feedback loop of falling stock prices, ETF rebalancing, margin calls, and further price declines. In response, the South Korean government plans to limit individual investment in such products to 20% of total assets, raise transaction costs, and increase the minimum cash threshold to 30 million won starting July 31. New product launches and advertisements have also been suspended.

SK Hynix reported a record second-quarter profit on Wednesday, but this failed to meet investors' extremely high expectations, exacerbating the market downturn. On Thursday, Samsung Electronics announced its second-quarter semiconductor business profit surged over 250 times from a year earlier. While it forecast continued strong AI chip and memory chip demand and supply shortages this year, the stock market still ended lower on Thursday.

The survey also indicated that economists expect South Korea's July imports to rise 26.6% year-on-year, down from a 30.0% increase in June. The median forecast for the July trade surplus is $29.59 billion, likely below June's $36.09 billion. South Korea is scheduled to release its July trade data on Saturday, August 1, at 9:00 AM local time (00:00 GMT).

South Korea: The Quintessential Beneficiary of the Memory Chip Super Cycle

The underlying logic of South Korea's surging chip exports is not simply about selling more GPUs. It stems from a shift in AI computing architecture from a GPU-centric model to a coordinated expansion of computing, memory bandwidth, capacity, and interconnects. Training large models requires constant movement of weights, activations, gradients, and optimizer states. The inference and agent era, with its long contexts, concurrent users, and persistent agents, rapidly expands KV Cache demands. As Tensor Core compute speed outpaces traditional external storage data supply, the system bottleneck increasingly becomes the ability to feed data into the compute core.

HBM, by vertically stacking DRAM dies and expanding I/O channels near the GPU package, pushes bandwidth per watt to levels unattainable by traditional memory. It has thus evolved from a GPU accessory to a core component determining AI accelerator utilization. This demand has a dual multiplier effect from higher per-unit content and increased server numbers. Nvidia's H100 uses about 80GB of HBM with over 3TB/s bandwidth, while the Blackwell Ultra can have up to 288GB of HBM3E at 8TB/s. The next-generation Rubin could feature 288GB of HBM4 with a peak bandwidth of 22TB/s. This means each AI platform iteration not only adds more GPUs but also continuously increases the HBM capacity, bandwidth, stacking layers, and packaging complexity required per accelerator. SK Hynix's HBM4, with 2,048 I/O channels, achieves about 2.54 times the bandwidth of the previous generation and over 40% better energy efficiency, specifically designed to alleviate the growing "memory wall" between model scale and data movement speed.

Importantly, the HBM boom also boosts demand for general-purpose DRAM, server DDR5, low-power server memory, and enterprise SSDs. Producing HBM requires multiple high-spec DRAM dies, larger wafer area, TSV stacking, and advanced packaging. As manufacturers prioritize high-margin HBM, the effective supply of traditional DRAM tightens. Meanwhile, AI servers still need large-capacity DDR5 or SOCAMM for CPUs, and inference data, vector databases, and KV Cache drive enterprise SSD demand. SK Hynix has stated that HBM investment is improving the supply-demand balance for general DRAM, while demand for server DDR5 and eSSD in AI data centers is becoming a new growth pillar.

Based on closing prices of approximately 207,000 won for Samsung Electronics and 1,322,000 won for SK Hynix on July 30, 2026, Nomura's target prices imply significant upside potential: 225% for Samsung Electronics (at 670,000 won) and 255.5% for SK Hynix (at 4,700,000 won). Nomura analysts argue that Samsung and SK Hynix should no longer be viewed as traditional memory stocks dependent on PC and smartphone cycles, but as structural growth assets within AI infrastructure. This assessment is based on three factors: AI training, inference, and data center expansion keeping memory demand above supply growth; a resonant super-cycle for HBM and general memory; and the companies' low forward P/E of about 6 times, significantly below TSMC's ~20 times, which fails to reflect their earnings sustainability and rising ROE. Consequently, Nomura raised its target for Samsung from 590,000 won to 670,000 won, and for SK Hynix from 4,000,000 won to 4,700,000 won.